What happened in June of 2009 within the Fedora Project?

Wed Oct 14 17:47:16 UTC 2009

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 6:24 PM, Robyn Bergeron <robyn.bergeron at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 8:12 AM, Larry Cafiero <larry.cafiero at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Hey, all --
> >
> > I'm not sure I'm following this proposal correctly, so I may need a
> little
> > help. So maybe a little clarification might help, please.
> >
> > On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 5:22 AM, Gregory Zysk <gz.int.project at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> Dear Marketing,
> >>
> >> One of the first things I see in order to help in marketing is the
> >> establishment of measurement systems. Measurement systems allow us
> >> internally to gauge how we are doing, and what needs to be improved.
> This is
> >> true also for the those viewing the community from an external
> standpoint.
> >> These measurements will provide us with more legitimacy and provide a
> >> platform where we are transparent about our results and that our results
> are
> >> measurable (and not some abstract way that no one can understand). I can
> >> see https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing_research that we have
> begun to
> >> start an formulate research that will be used to produce these
> statistics,
> >> but fail to see any methodologies that are used to base these
> questionnaires
> >> off of.
> >
>
> I'll have a more extensive response later this morning (like after I
> replace my headlight on my car, ugh!) - but I just wanted to interject
> here before we go running off on a tangent:
>
> As the person heading up the market research "stuff," I would be
> delighted to have more input / help in the process. I'm not quite sure
> what you mean by methodologies

>>>Methodology -How you will attack to apply your research. It usually
consists of which secondary/primary data you are basing your research design
off of.
The next is Research design: Will this consist of exploratory
(interviews/focus groups) or descriptive research (survey methods and
errors)?  If per say you use a descriptive research design: Which sampling
will you use? The things I have seen proposed before (I.E. Do you like
Fedora? 1-5 Very Much, Much, Average, Not much, not at all) this is called
likert scaling. This is market research and market research is a science. It
does not show difference to a profit-industry or FOSS. It is not industry
specific.

, or if you mean something more like
> goals, long-term strategy, etc.;

>>>This is what is formed from the Market research process:)

> at this point, given the lack of any
> sort of user research being done in the past several years, the first
> swag at doing surveys is to get a general baseline of who are users
> ARE, so that we know who they are not, for the purposes of generally
> catering to Fedora customers better

>>>This data can be used for a pilot for the greater market research process
as a whole.

> .  Or to put it in marketing-speak:
> determine who our market is, where our market could be, with the end
> goal of figuring out how we get from point A to point B.

>>>That is generally the point.

> The fact is,
> we can speculate a lot about who Fedora users are, what types of user
> groups they fit into (IT people? college students? predominantly
> people not in the US?) - but without asking who they are, and getting
> a general feel for that, and what their general satisfaction levels
> are, we really can't start to ask more pointed questions.  In fact, it
> becomes difficult to even set goals, or define strategies; we
> certainly don't want to put ourselves in the position of setting goals
> that are either impossible to obtain, or essentially already achieved.
>
> And WRT goals / strategies, there has been a thread ongoing on the
> fedora board mailing list discussing this very subject; Mel sent out a
> mail last Friday referencing this.
>
> https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2009-October/msg00035.html
>
> As an FYI, there is more coming on the market research front, which
> I'll be sending out hopefully today; I've been saddled with being
> sick, school stuff, and a lost cat :( so things haven't been moving
> the way I'd like them to.  However, this discussion has been filled
> with lots of goodness that I'll be taking into consideration, and of
> course I'd like feedback when I send things out for people to review.
>

>>> Sorry to hear that :(

>
> > OK, that's fine. I'm with you so far, until we get to here:
> >
> >> One thing I would like to start with to help all of you form a marketing
> >> mindset is to ask the question of "What happened in June of 2009 within
> the
> >> Fedora Project?
> >>
> >> As you can see: https://fedorahosted.org/fama/wiki/AmbassadorMetricsviews
> >> that we have had a steady increase since measurement began in January of
> >> 2006. That is until June of 2009.
> >>
> >> Once we can answer this question, we can begin to answer these
> >> sub-questions:
> >>
> >> 1) Who were these ambassadors?
> >> 2) What specific contributor groups were they apart of?
> >> 3) Where did they go after they left the ambassador group?
> >
> > Joerg can probably help out here -- please do, Joerg -- but wasn't June
> 2009
> > when we implemented the mentor program for Ambassadors? Before this
> program,
> > basically, the only requirement you needed to be a Fedora Ambassador was
> > that you had an e-mail address, a regular pulse and steady breathing
> > (although the breathing part didn't have to be steady, as long as you
> were
> > breathing). Now there's a more detailed process to follow, which a.)
> scares
> > off those who are not committed to Fedora and only want "free stuff," and
> > b.) allows us a to cultivate a better quality of Ambassador.
> >
> > As Joerg may have mentioned also, I believe around this time the
> Ambassadors
> > list was purged of non-participants. Messages were sent out and those who
> > did not respond (or responded that they were no longer interested) were
> > taken off.
> >
> > That could explain largely why numbers "dropped," providing a false
> negative
> > when you look at the numbers without applying the changes.
> >
> > I could be wrong about the timing of the mentor project's initiation, but
> I
> > would bet that's why numbers dropped.
> >
> >> Please feels free to give me your comments and suggestions regarding
> this
> >> issue, so we can start to problem solve some issues to help us provide
> >> better and more improved results, as we do technically with every
> release.
> >
> > Unfortunately, I don't have as much time to participate in the marketing
> > group as I would like, but I'd be more interested in analyzing external
> > developments, like why did record numbers of people download Fedora 11
> and
> > what are their experiences (good/bad/indifferent) and build a marketing
> > scenario around that, rather than use the time and effort to look
> internally
> > at how many people participate in Fedora and why.
>
> This is precisely the kind of information I'd like to be getting from
> doing user surveys in the future.  Figure out what we are doing right,
> and do more of it; figure out what is going wrong, and fix it.
>
> As for internal surveying, I think it would be useful to occasionally
> gauge community members on their satisfaction levels, etc., but I
> think this unfortunately becomes an exercise in scratching our own
> backs; if they're here, they're probably happy, if they're not, they
> certainly have the freedom to voice their opinions and
> dissatisfactions (and likely are doing so), and if they are leaving,
> there is probably a very low percentage that they will come back.  The
> dissatisfaction level, I would suspect, would probably be low enough
> to not warrant any huge changes to "the system"; it would be more
> something that would need to be tackled on a one-on-one basis, which
> is not something you want to do when you're surveying people (ie: I'm
> going to get your name, and then I'm going to contact you directly -
> this tends to turn survey participants off quite a bit).  Individual
> group leaders could take on the task of figuring out why their people
> are leaving, particularly if it seems to be systemic, but this may be
> a lot to ask, but could certainly be valuable in preventing the issues
> that caused community members to leave in the first place.
>
> As for general statistics - I think it is certainly interesting, and
> definitely something that could be automated/scripted, but we need to
> be careful to not bombard users with endless requests for how they are
> feeling.  Once a quarter, twice a year, focused on specific topics is
> the way to go, IMO.  Looking at things like downloads, what countries
> they are coming from, what architectures people are using can
> certainly be valuable (if we have a crapton of downloads originating
> in the Bahamas, and no ambassador there, then we might want to start
> having the "who wants to move to the islands!!! contest) to ensure
> that we are focusing resources in the right places.
>
> >
> > Maybe I misunderstand your proposal, Gregory, but you asked for comments,
> so
> > here are mine.
> >
> > Larry Cafiero
> > Regional Ambassador, U.S. West Coast states
> > Fedora Project
> >
> >
> > --
> > Fedora-marketing-list mailing list
> > Fedora-marketing-list at redhat.com
> > https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
> >
>
> --
> Fedora-marketing-list mailing list
> Fedora-marketing-list at redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
>

-- 
Gregory Zysk

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Gmzysk

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